Remembrance Of Patients Past

'Oh that I had wings I would fly like a dove and be at rest I would fly out of this asylum ....' So wrote Ralph M., a patient at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane from 1889 until his death in 1911. Winston O., another inmate at the Toronto asylum, actually sought to build wings like Ralph so longed for. After crafting violins that he played and building from scratch an automobile he was allowed to drive on the hospital grounds, Winston was reported to be working on the construction of an 'aeroplane'. In Remembrance of Patients Past, historian Geoffrey Reaume chronicles seventy years of daily life at the institution known as 999, the Toronto Hospital for the Insane at 999 Queen Street West. His narrative stretches from 1870 to 1940 and examines such aspects as diagnosis and admission, daily routine and relationships, leisure, patients' labor, family and community responses, and discharge and death. Mental patients were at times abused, and they led lives of tedious monotony that could tend to 'flatten' personality, yet many of these women and men worked hard at institutional jobs for years and decades on end, created their own entertainment, and formed meaningful relationships with other patients and staff. A moving chronicle, the book is also an important argument for flexibility in treatment for mental illnesses and a challenge to the view that traditional mental institutions were of little help to their patients.

This long-awaited reader explores the history of Canadian people with disabilities from Confederation to current day. This edited collection focuses on Canadians with mental, physical, and cognitive disabilities, and discusses their lives, work, and influence on public policy. Organized by time period, the 23 chapters in this collection are authored by a diverse group of scholars who discuss the untold histories of Canadians with disabilities―Canadians who influenced science and technology, law, education, healthcare, and social justice. Selected chapters discuss disabilities among Indigenous women; the importance of community inclusion; the ubiquity of stairs in the Montreal metro; and the ethics of disability research. This volume is a terrific resource for students and anyone interested in disability studies, history, sociology, social work, geography, and education. Untold Stories: A Canadian Disability History Reader offers an exceptional presentation of influential people with various disabilities who brought about social change and helped to make Canada more accessible.

About the publication Pathways of patients explores the casebooks of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum during the superintendence of Dr Thomas Duncan Greenlees, from 1890 to 1907. The hallmark of Pathways of patients is an examination of the asylum’s casebooks to bring into view the humanity of the patients, their distinct personal experiences, and their individuality. The book is underpinned by an allied goal to retrieve the casebook narratives of the patients’ life stories, their acts of agency, and their pathways to and from the asylum, with a view to understanding and portraying the context of patient experiences at the time.

Disabling Barriers analyzes issues relating to disability at different moments in Canadian and American history. In this volume, legal scholars, historians, and disability-rights activists explore how disabled people have been portrayed and treated in a variety of contexts, including within the labour market, the workers’ compensation system, the immigration process, and the legal system (both as litigants and as lawyers). The contributors encourage us to rethink our understanding of both the systemic barriers disabled people face and the capacity of disabled people to transform their environment by changing the discourse surrounding disablement.

Between 1890 and 1910 scientific and technological innovation transformed the custodial Victorian charity hospital for the sick poor into the primary source of effective acute medical care for all members of society. For the next half century hospitals coped with relentlessly escalating demands for accessibility by both medical indigents and a new clientele of patients able and willing to pay for hospitalization. With limited statutory revenues and unpredictable voluntary support, hospitals taxed paying patients through ever-increasing user fees, offering in return privacy, comfort, service, and medical attendance in private and semi-private wards that were more appealing to middle-class patients than the stark and grudging service of the public wards.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.

The Squashed edition of The Remembrance of Times Past (A la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust. Abridged from the original text to read in an hour or so. Squashed editions are precise abridgements - the original ideas, in their own words, the full beam of the book, the quotable quotes and all the famous lines, but neatly honed down to the length of a readable short story. ""Like reading the bible without all the begats"" - Prof. Jim Curtis

Madness in the Family explores how colonial families coped with insanity through a trans-colonial study of the relationships between families and public colonial hospitals for the insane in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand between 1860 and 1914.